An Application of Constraint Programming to Mobile Data
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Date
2005-10-19
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Abstract
Given the current ubiquity of wireless networks and mobile devices, data must be disseminated to a large number of these devices in an effective and efficient manner. A promising technique for such applications is data broadcasting. We introduce a new optimization problem derived from mobile data broadcasting applications. A single broadcaster transmits pages of data in sequence in response to requests from multiple clients, each asking for different subsets of a set of available pages. A transmitted page can be read by any number of clients, and we aim to minimise the total time taken to transmit all pages. Users impose additional constraints on how long they are willing to wait between pages, because of limited power supply in mobile devices. This problem is closely related to the multiple sequence alignment problem from bioinformatics. We present a first constraint model for this problem, designed for use with randomized local search algorithms.